RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

A series of emotions were exposed as this essay emerged from a blank piece of paper: thankfulness for being born where and when I was; concern as to whether we truly understand the meaning of service and sacrifice; and scorn for our current attitude of trivializing victimhood, which now include those who hear words they find hurtful. Sydney Williams

“Six million of our people live on in our hearts. We are their eyes that remember.We are their voice that cries out. The dreadful scenes flow from their dead eyes to our open ones. And those scenes will be remembered exactly as they happen. Shimon Peres (1923-2016) Former Prime Minister and President of Israel                                               

The American Transcendentalist Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was an abolitionist and reforming minister of the Unitarian Church. He is, perhaps, best remembered for a quote, since borrowed by others, most notably Martin Luther King and Barack Obama. The quote came from a sermon delivered in 1853, when the scourge of slavery still blemished the character of the American Republic. His words would have been wistful, even fatuous, to the more than three million Americans still then enslaved: “Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” Grand words – and perhaps true given enough time – but little solace for those who suffer the evil of man’s cruelty to man.

There are places we visit where we express gratitude for the sacrifices made by a few for the many: Arlington National Cemetery, the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing at the Somme, the American Cemetery at Normandy, the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor and the Florence American Cemetery, where 326 GIs from the 10th Mountain Division lie, including Juan Barrientos from my father’s squad whose grave I have visited. There are other memorials dedicated to the deliberate, pre-planned evil that man has inflicted on man, like the memorial to the victims of 9/11. These tend to be less grand, but more poignant, like Memorial Hall in Nanking, dedicated to the victims of the Japanese massacre in 1937, the memorial to the Holodomor victims in Ukraine, the Wall of Grief in Moscow that memorializes those killed in Stalin’s Gulags, the Choeung Ek Memorial in Cambodia to victims of the Khmer Rouge and the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. Sadly, there are other examples of man’s inhumanity to man for which there are no memorials, such as the estimated thirty million Chinese who died during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.

In Europe, there are places of remembrance for the more than six million Jews killed during Hitler’s reign of terror. More than two dozen concentration camps in Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Holland and Austria are open to visitors. They sit as reminders of what man is capable. In Berlin, there is the spacious Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and in Vienna a small memorial; but both seem inadequate to the horrors Nazis inflicted. But the one in Prague is different.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13842/palestinians-arrest-torture-journalists

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, a body dominated by Fatah loyalists, condemned the arrest of Hazem Nasser and called for his immediate release. The syndicate pointed out that Nasser had been summoned for interrogation by the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces several times in the past few weeks despite the fact that he did not commit any crime.

In the world of the PA and Hamas, the only “good” journalists are those who report negatively about Israel. Independent journalists therefore find themselves forced to seek work in non-Palestinian media organizations, including some in Israel. Even then, these journalists, especially those who live under the PA and Hamas, engage in massive self-censorship.

What is hard to understand are the continued closed mouths of the international community and media towards this ongoing assault on the freedom of the media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Had Nasser and Abu Arafeh been arrested by the Israeli authorities, their “plight” would have been splashed over headlines across the globe.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank is continuing its unremitting security crackdown on Palestinian journalists, particularly on those who are not affiliated with Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction. Scores of journalists have been arrested or summoned by the PA in the West Bank on a regular basis in the past few years. In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Palestinian journalists are facing a similar campaign of intimidation and harassment.

In the past few days, another two journalists, Hazem Nasser and Amer Abu Arafeh, were arrested by the PA security forces — and not for the first time. Nasser, who is from the city of Tulkarem, and Abu Arafeh, who is from Hebron, have, in fact, become “frequent visitors” of PA detention centers and interrogation rooms.

The incarceration of Nasser and Abu Arafeh brings to 16 the number of Palestinian journalists who have been arrested or summoned for interrogation by the PA security forces in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip just since the beginning of this year.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/06/must

Britain, in recent days, has had a rare distraction from its seemingly endless Brexit debate. The distraction, however, has not been an altogether welcome one. It involves the case of Shamima Begum, one of a number of girls who left their school in Bethnal Green in London in 2015 to go and join ISIS.

Back then, in 2015, the story of the Bethnal Green schoolgirls was headline news. Many British people were genuinely shocked that anyone—let alone young women at the start of their lives—would find ISIS’s promise of a Caliphate so alluring that they would leave the comforts of their friends, family, and country in the UK to go to join the group. There was much national debate about this. Various people, including some of the girls’ family members, blamed the British police and security services for not stopping the girls from leaving the UK. Ironically, the people who blamed the police—including the lawyer representing the girls’ families—were often precisely the same people as those who had spent previous years urging Muslims in Britain not to cooperate with the British police. How exactly the British police were either to blame, or to find any way to “win” in such a situation, was never explained. It was just one of many paradoxes thrown up in these circumstances.